I’m browsing the Web using Linux… first time. It’s pretty great and didn’t cost anything.
Which distribution?
Who cares? It’s UNIX by any other name.
Join us. We WILL prevail. Resistance is futile.
“Give my regards to Ed and Vi.”
There’s an article in PC Magazine about a computer being sold by a company in California for $159. Interestingly, PC Mag. gives it a pretty good review. It runs Linspire, the OS formerly known as “Lindows.” No monitor. But, fast processor, generally pretty good parts.
Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) has been a very nice acquaintance.
Real easy to get started with and runs fine on both PC and Mac.
I currently run it on an old IMB 600E laptop.
/MarcusR
Unix rocks.
Anybody else here proficient with vi? I love to use vi especially to baffle people who don’t understand it.
I’ve even got Elvis, which is vi for windows. I’ve tried to get my son to use it, because he does a lot of windows-y programming, but I can’t get him to see the advantage of a line editor as opposed to a word-processor. At the age of fifteen he’s an excellent touch typist so the ordinary “it’s quicker” arguments flow right past him.
The old Perkin-Elmer line-editor was better in one respect: you could change a column for a range of lines. But it doesn’t exist any more, so vi is best.
I have a Windows vi of some kind but haven’t used it in awhile. I don’t know if it’s Elvis or not.
Ahhh system monospaced … those were the days …
I need to dig out that Tux whistling avatar I had a year or so back. Hmm… Tuxopelli?
It’s not so bad, here in the twelfth century…
Fry’s sells those too, and there are Fry’s all over, not just california. I have 3 of them in the house (Upgraded my wife’s last year, and was so pleased I went back and bought two more). I’m about to get a fourth to turn it into a central file server. These are amazingly good buys.
I only use vi when I have to edit MUD stuff on the server for a friend of mine who runs a MUD. It’s the evil.
There’s many versions of vi (vedit comes to mind). Its great until you want to do something vi can’t handle. Then its back to dear old ed again.
I’m leery about recommending *nix to people, as it forces you to understand the hardware and software of your PC a lot more than many care to know. There is nothing plug ‘n’ play about *nix, and encouraging non-techies to get a *nix system is guaranteeing that you will be helping them non-stop for the next year until they get grounded (or throw it at you). I know there are a lot more people who are tech-savvy today than in the past, so this makes for a larger audience capable of handling the complexities of *nix, but you still have to be careful who you recommend it to.
djm
My wife does a lot of informal Windows support.
Tell me again why this is different from Windows…
I’ve been using vi since 1980 (anyone remember Onyx Systems Z8000 based Unix systems?)
I used Elvis for quite a while (it was especially useful when I was writing Unix man pages - it has a nice man preview mode), but these days I use vim/gvim as my preferred “vi” both under Linux and on Windows.
Yeah, the vi family is a bit of a pain to learn, but - unlike the emacs variants - the basic commands are pretty consistent. (Though I was using emacs quite happily for a while, I got tired of having to relearn the basic command keys every time I switched versions).
These days, I have a .vimrc (vim configuration file) that I install on every new system - Unix or PC - right after installing vim, and I’m good to go.
I’m just a computer whipper-snapper. I didn’t start using vi until around '87. I never did get the hang of emacs. Mainly because I learned vi and figured, why bother. It’s been over a year since I’ve used it but I think that given a command line I could remember without much ado.
Next: AWK. How many of you UNIX guru’s used AWK? I never liked SED btw. When I first got hired by the old Upjohn Company I had to move a huge Documentum docbase from an HP server to Solaris. I had written quite a bit of C code for the system and I made the assumption that the code would compile correctly on the Sun box. Wrong. At 2:00 AM Sunday the system itself had been moved successfully including all the Oracle tables. However those pesky users would expect everything to work right by Monday morning. I had to make a decision. Figure out why cc didn’t work the same on both platforms or file for unemployment. I had never used awk at that time. With a flash of desperation I decided to rewrite every program (fortunately only about 2000 lines all told) in AWK. Perfect. All I had to do was learn the syntax to the Documentum API’s in AWK and learn AWK. Oh, and write test scripts, run the test scripts, put the whole thing in validation, run the validation scripts and copy to production. This was pharmaceutical and nothing hits production without proper test scripts or the FDA will have your butt in a sling. Stealing into my manager’s office I snatched his O’Reilly book and started cranking.
Needless to say everything worked like a charm with no cost in performance and I still had time that afternoon to go home and have a beer and a nice sleep. I’ve been an AWK fan ever since.
…Sigh. Man, I sure loved that. Why, I’d cuss and piss and moan and threaten that server and always fix the problem. Now all I do is crap-assed support for stupid users. …sigh…
Oh, awk (and sed) . . .
I have a similar story from the mid-80’s - the place I was working at was moving from an old PDP 11/20 system to a newer Vax/Unix setup.
But we several embedded assembly code products to maintain (several hundred thousand lines of assembly code), and the Unix assembler syntax was sufficiently different that nothing would build.
Hand-editing the files would have taken a couple of weeks (and lots of potential for error) - instead, I spent a couple of days writing a shell script that used separate passes of awk and sed to do the conversion. Did a great job, and got me a reputation as a real Unix guru (in the country of the blind . . .).
Brilliant! 
How did you know what to tell AWK in order to convert one assembly instruction to another? You must have known the code yourself or there must have been a pattern such as, MOV 1h,10 = MOVE 10,2d or some such. I mean, you had to know what registers to use!!!111eleven!
You’re my new hero.
Hey wait a minute!! VAX/Unix??? I thought VAX used VMS?
- My team was the current owner of all the code (so yes, we did know the changes needed). We were still supporting the same target CPU (Motorola 6802 - talk about a dinosaur!).
I did rework the scripts slightly a year or so later to create a 6802->6809 converter, but given their close similarity it still wasn’t terribly hard. I rather liked the 6809 - probably my favorite 8-bit CPU (During the 80’s I worked with 8080, Z80, 8085, 6502, 6802, 68HC11, and 6809, so I have some basis for comparison. I’m ignoring the 8088 and 68008 since they were really 16-bit chips with an 8 bit bus width)
- Yes, VMS was the usual Vax OS, but Ultrix (DEC Unix) was available as an option. Since most of the programmers preferred the Unix development tools (and we were cross-developing for embedded CPUs, anyway) we went with Ultrix.